Japanese Translator .co .uk
Japanese Translation & Typesetting

May 2005: Sudoku

No, I haven't been asked to translate anything associated with sudoku, but since the word seems to be in the news a lot these days, I thought I'd explain what it means and how to pronounce it.

In case you're unfamiliar with the word, sudoku is the latest puzzle craze sweeping the UK. It involves placing numbers into a 9x9 grid so that every row, column and 3x3 block contains all the numbers 1 to 9 once only. For example, consider the first three columns of the grid shown here. The number 1 appears in the first column of the 3x3 block at the top, and in the second column of the 3x3 block at the bottom. We know the number 1 must also appear in the middle 3x3 block, and we also know that no number can appear twice in the same column of the grid. Therefore the number 1 must appear below the 9 and the 5 in the middle 3x3 block.

The word "sudoku" is actually an abbreviation of the phrase suji wa dokushin ni kagiru — or "Only single numbers allowed" — which was the title of the puzzle when it appeared in a Japanese puzzle magazine in 1984. ("Su" means "number" and "doku" means "single".) It is pronounced like the English words "Sue Dock" with a short "oo" sound tagged on to the end of "Dock" (half as long as the "oo" sound in "Sue"). These puzzles are also referred to as "number place" or "nam-pure" (rhymes with "crème brûlée").

Just for fun, I've made a sudoku puzzle solver tool which you're welcome to try out.